


Learn to exist

by allollipoppins



Series: Detroit : Beyond Human [1]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Background Connora, F/M, Gen, Human Alice Williams, Light Angst, Menstruation, Mother-Daughter Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-08
Updated: 2018-06-08
Packaged: 2019-05-19 21:41:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14881742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allollipoppins/pseuds/allollipoppins
Summary: Growing up is inevitable. It is, after all, part of the human cycle given that they aren’t dotted of a regeneration process the way androids do. Having to accept that Alice won’t be a little girl forever hits Kara more than she expected it to. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing.





	Learn to exist

**Author's Note:**

> Me: oh this new CoryxKenshin gameplay looks cool, it's not horror but I'll check it out  
> Also me: brainstorms prompt ideas 3 days after finishing to watch the playthrough.  
> "..... well shit."
> 
> Turn out I am capable to writing things that aren't Victuuri/YoI ^^ I recently got sucked into Connora hell so here, have some family fic and suffer with me.  
> I have other prompts for OSs which I'd like to write over the next few days, we'll see how that goes :)
> 
> Title taken from the lyrics of a French song, "Alors d'Accord" from the Roi Soleil musical.
> 
> This work was unbeta'ed and written by a person who is not a native English speaker. Any mistake's mine, feel free to hit me with the typos I make.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own Kara, Alice, Connor or any other character and/or element affiliated to Detroit: Become Human.

The day it hits her is also the first time Alice has her period.

The teenage girl had been behaving rather strangely, to say the least. It was as if everything happening around her were causing her to become increasingly moody. Alice had been rather shifty since the beginning of the week. Nothing terrible or unnatural, as far as Kara could tell. She grumbled a little more in the mornings when she had to wake up early for school, dragging herself out of her warm bed and under the shower, then down the stairs to get her breakfast. When she comes back home Alice doesn’t look so well, her face pale and the flush on her cheeks and forehead a telltale indication that she isn’t feeling well. Kara had momentarily panicked and checked for a fever, but there was nothing.

It isn’t until the cramps begin that she understands what is going on. Alice wraps her arms around her stomach and almost doubled over on the chair she sits at in the kitchen, her head hitting the edge of the table and threatening to make her math homework tumble over. Kara’s gaze roams up and down, taking in her flushed cheeks and slightly wobbly limbs.

“Kara,” she whimpers in a way that is eerily familiar, and tugs at something indescribable inside her. “Kara, what is going on with me?”

Kara… doesn’t really know what to say at first. She had seen other women in the same situation as herself, looking down at their daughter with their lips stretched into a large smile over pearly-white teeth, grinning in a way meant to be sweet, but that came off rather grim and weary at times.

“You’re a woman now,” they would announce proudly as they helped to clean up, and repeated incessantly when the pair would go to the nearest supermarket to buy pads in all shapes and sizes possible – the girls, Kara noticed, would later on shift to tampons, regardless of what other girls and their mother said about how these things could make you lose your virginity; sometimes humans could be so very silly. They almost chant the words as if it were something to celebrate and not to fear. Girls duck their head in embarrassment when people overhear it and glance in their direction. Even when the cashier’s blank gaze remains unfazed after scanning their products, the shame is all too fresh to wipe away.

Kara doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it, but she doesn’t want Alice to feel uncomfortable enough not to want to address the matter with her. Alice wouldn’t want the clinical explanation, and she is probably too in pain to have the patience to listen through a whole speech.

“How about I run you a warm bath?” she offers instead. “Some hot water might make you feel better.”

Alice considers it for a moment, then nods imperceptibly.

It had been a while since she had last carried Alice anywhere, something she realizes when she takes her in her arms. Her arms instinctively curl under her back and knees, pulling her closer as Alice curls up against her, burying her face in the crook of her neck. She makes a whining sound coming from deep in her throat when Kara sets her down on her feet in the bathroom, but lets herself be manhandled when the android undresses her. Her face blanches, however, when she spot the red spot in her undergarments. It seems like the vision of the faint red circle blooming at the centre brings her back to reality.

“Oh,” her lips form, a quiet sound Kara almost wouldn’t have heard hadn’t it been for her advanced audio captors. She doesn’t sound surprised, nor does she appear particularly excited or downcast. The expression on her face is painfully neutral, contemplative. Accepting, even.

“Oh,” Kara echoes. There is no word needed to describe what is happening. She pats her head a little, then gathers the clothes in a bundle that goes into the laundry basket by the washing machine. Alice watches her moving as she passes by her, dips a hand in the water that is gradually filling the bathtub. Sensing that it will soon tip on a hot meter Alice wouldn’t be able to stand, she turns off the tap.

“I’ll go buy you some things at the store, and we’ll get you in bed once I get back, alright?”

Alice nods, sinking into the hot water and letting out a soft sight as its warmth swallows her. Kara spares her a glance before turning the other way.

She doesn’t like the idea of leaving her alone, even knowing she will only be gone for a few minutes to the store next door, and the door will be locked behind her with no way for anyone to go in. Old habits die hard.

The time Kara enters the store, she doesn’t waste time. She gets packets of pads of different sizes, almost without looking at them, and pays for them at the cashier. The person in charge, a young adult woman, barely looks up from the phone resting on her lap except for scanning, and Kara exits with a “have a nice day hanging in the air”, answered by an absent grumble.

Half an hour later, once the young girl has been changed into new clothes and been shown how to use the pads, Kara watches as Alice curls up on her bed, pulling the covers on top of her no matter how stifling the heat is underneath them. She curls herself into a fetal position, tights and knees digging into her chest.

It is then, after she has been tucked in bed and is far away from the world of the living, that it hits Kara.

Alice is not a child anymore.

The changes are subtle, in her opinion, or at the very least noticeable only to herself – she doesn’t dare ask Connor if he’s seen it too. It’s the little things one only notices when they take a picture and compare the before and the after, the then and the now.

Alice has grown like a weed over the years, and she and Connor had both watched with a certain pride as she bloomed before their eyes. She had lost some of her soft features, her cheeks thinner but still a little round. Her legs were so long now that she was close to becoming taller than Kara herself. Even Hank himself had said during his last visit that if she kept going like that she would surely be as tall as Connor.

Alice’s nails grew longer; years ago she would let out her frustration on her poor fingers while doing her homework, or when in deep thought. Like the coin trick for Connor, only this was Alice’s ritual. The crescent moons vary in shapes and size. Some days they are smooth, oval curves and on others their edges are sharper, cut into squares. She paints them with transparent nail polish or alternately with baby pink, the finish a pearly shade that looks all natural. The colours mature afterwards to a combination of beige and white that takes her hours to master, or over time to a milky coffee hue that feels more grown up, but remains quite light.

(She had witnessed their effect first-hand, when a boy whom she supposed was one of Alice’s classmates had gone up to her while they were out shopping. She hadn’t liked the way he looked at her though, and if looks were clues she was sure that the teenage girl hadn’t appreciated it either. The next minute Alice had sunk her nails into his wrist when he had grabbed her arm. They dug with a pleasant squish in his flesh, so deep Kara almost missed the way his left eye had twitched from afar.

“Please don’t touch me,” Alice had smiled sweetly – fakely – at him, enough to make Kara shiver, and rival Connor’s own expressions. This she hadn’t learnt from her.)

Lip gloss, on the other hand, is not as discreet as she had thought it would be. Sure, it looked and smelt just like your average lip balm, but lip balm wasn’t supposed to look this… glittery. It doesn’t look cheap either, compared to the thick, greasy vaseline chapsticks Kara had first bought her at the drugstore downtown.

Alice was by no means unpopular at school, and she received invitations back and forth for this or that party – Kara suspected there were a few guys in the bunch, though whether they had asked and been turned down or had simply never gotten the courage to ask, she couldn’t be sure of. The skirt of her school uniform had lost a couple of inches with time too. She tried not to read too much into it either; bar Markus, Luther and Hank, whom she saw most often, she had her own share of “male” friends. And Connor guarded Alice like a hound whenever such human specimens came knocking at the door – though they were few and far between.

Kara knew about that too, the things mothers nagged their daughters about, the kind of secrets that weren’t much in the way of secrets but that felt special only when shared between girls. The kind of confession that started as “he kissed me” and never as “I kissed him”. It was, and would always be about human boys leading girls – leading women – on, making them believe they had a remote chance of being their girlfriend. The closest thing they’d ever had to a shot at a good life. Human girls had problems female-passing androids never had to her knowledge.

Her friends had gone on dates with other people, kissed said dates. Kara knew Alice had probably had her own kisses in the past, though nothing serious had come out of any of these relationships, not enough for her to tell Kara and Connor – but she knew. They didn’t nag her about it, but they did talk about it between themselves. Connor tended to jump to the conclusion that someone might try to get to them through her because of their connections with the android liberation movement. It felt easier to accept, that to admit that they scared that someone – anyone – might hurt their little girl.

She thinks, distantly, of December. Hank had given Alice a pocket knife for Christmas. It’s a small thing, in fact small enough to actually be attached to a key ring. When Alice had gazed up at him in question, no less delighted, he’d simply shrugged and said that it couldn’t hurt to be careful, especially now that she had more classes a little later in the evening. North had laughed and assured Hank that with all the self-defence she has taught Alice, it was her who was bound to make people run for their lives. Markus joined in her laughter, just as Luther and Connor did, albeit more discreetly. Kara had smiled, but chosen not to add anything. She knew exactly what her not-so-little-anymore little girl was capable of.

(Or does she?)

There are no secrets in their little household. Being, in their own words, a strange but united family, these things have very little place. Connor has always been driven by his sincerity – though he can be pretty blunt most of the time – and Alice usually makes a point of telling them when something is wrong; they both find time to confide in her when need be, Alice asking her around bedtime or dinner and Connor communicating with her telepathically.

While Connor is at work and Alice at school, she tends to the house. Cleans the rooms, does the laundry, goes through the mail. Kara still cleans Alice’s room, though she does it less and less. She had been told that it wasn’t a good thing, to indulge children so much past infancy, but it isn’t something she can really help. Alice doesn’t mind, but one day she is sure to.

It’s inevitable. Children stop being their parents’ children at some point in life, but it is not so much that which bothers her. Alice isn’t theirs to begin with, isn’t hers to call her daughter. One one hand she could easily pass off as Connor’s, the two of them sharing brown hair and eyes. At most Kara could say that they are siblings, though they only have freckles in common in the first place. But Kara isn’t Alice’s sister, just as she and Connor aren’t her biological parents and Alice is growing.

What’s an android to do, when everyone else ignores her presence, except be something that doesn’t exist at all? Or simply stop _being_?

“No one ever kept me after that,” she thinks. Of her previous “lives”, Kara keeps no memory. She might have been like a sister to someone, more than a housekeeper and a nanny; she might have been something of a daughter figure for an older couple who were waiting on their child to grow. Waiting for their offspring to be a child no more, so they could send her away. Like many other AX400 models like herself. Sometimes parents keep them as is, or ask for reprogramming so the AX400s can take care of children of children, and the generations that will come after that. Of course they become obsolete at this point, but it is reassuring. They were made to be reassuring.

Kara supposed that she could do that… be reassuring, but even more than that. Beyond being Alice’s pillar during the revolution, and beyond Detroit, their relationship had grown. The fact that she wasn’t human had never posed an issue when they had escaped, and she couldn’t remember a time when it had caused a true hindrance. If anything, she had found that she preferred to call her deviancy, and her friend and lover’s own, a humane manifestation of themselves, rather than just empathy. More than understanding, there was true sympathy and compassion towards others, if not their little girl.

Kara is still deep in thought when Connor comes back from patrolling. She distantly hears Hank calling out something after him, muffled by the door clicking behind him. Kara is only shaken out of her daze when she feels something fall on her shoulder; Connor’s hand squeezes it gently, but the pressure is there.

“What’s wrong?” Connor asks as soon as he catches sight of her expression.

Cutting to the chase is all she can do, there’s no point in beating around the bush with Connor.

“Alice got her period,” she says.

His features relax slightly into something more composed, but the creases around his eyes are still prominent. His pupils widen a little.

“Is she alright? Do we need to buy anything?” She is glad that she doesn’t react the way most men do – human men, that is. Most show signs of disgust as the thought of a girl bleeding down there; sometimes they express fear when the word comes up, for a reason she can’t fathom.

Kara hums. “She’s okay. I already bought what she needed from the store. I gave her some hot chocolate and tucked her in for a nap an hour ago.”

Connor pauses, no doubt reassured that nothing had happened to Alice. And yet his fingers tighten still on her shoulder.

“Are _you_ alright?” The way he frowns when he looks at her, knowing how to spot all the signs of her distress, the way he frowns and the corners of his mouth pinch together is somehow adorable, but not an expression she likes on him. It doesn’t belong on his face, and it reminds her of how much she hates to make him worry for nothing.

“Yeah,” she says, leaning against him, “I’m fine.”

This, if anything, is better than any of her past experiences. She had gone through much worse in her short life. Kara can deal with this.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments, kudos and bookmarks are always appreciated :)  
> I'm @allollipoppins on tumblr & @AriL10N355 on twitter. Hmu!


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